Speculating the Subject of Money: Georg Simmel on Human Value

Devin Singh

doi:10.3390/rel7070080

Abstract

This article initiates an inquiry into the sources and frameworks of value used to denote human subjects in modernity. In particular, I consider the conflation of monetary, legal, and theological registers employed to demarcate human worth. Drawing on Simmel’s speculative genealogy of the money equivalent of human values, I consider the spectrum of ascriptions from specifically quantified to infinite human value. I suggest that predications of infinite human value require and imply quantified—and specifically monetary-economic—human value. Cost and worth, economically and legally defined, provide a foundation for subsequent eternal projections in a theological imaginary. This calls into question the interventionist potential of claims to infinite or unquantifiable human value as resistance to the contemporary financialization of human life and society.

Highlights

The question of human value—its sources and justifications—and the practice of pricing human life remain a challenge to moral and theoretical discourse in the West
There is a widespread unease at quantifying human value, and recognition that it is implicated in practices like human slavery and trafficking, coupled with the awareness that our modern political and economic institutions would cease to function without it
I hope to identify some of the operative factors in the transition from an episteme wherein monetized human value was standard practice to one where infinite, abstract, and/or nonmonetary human worth is taken as an ethical and conceptual norm

Summary

Introduction

The deviation from the norm appears to be a conception of abstract, infinite, or otherwise non-quantifiable human value, a notion of worth conceived of often in explicit resistance to economic categories This ideal is often the implicit substrate that is depicted as under “erosion” by the infiltration of money, pricing, and accounting measures into all areas of life. I hope to identify some of the operative factors in the transition from an episteme wherein monetized human value was standard practice to one where infinite, abstract, and/or nonmonetary human worth is taken as an ethical and conceptual norm This comparison to Taylor is not arbitrary: the question of monetization and economic erosion of traditional social and “sacred” ties is bound up with debates about the nature of secularization. I hope to chart a course for future investigation as part of the important emerging conversation around the confluence of religious and philosophical discourse with monetary economy

Simmel’s Genealogy

Abstract or Infinite Worth

The Self and Its Exchanges